Staff Sgt. Jason Johnson’s wife is named Patience. It’s a perfect name given the number of times he has deployed to a war zone, nine so far totaling 46 months. It’s also the perfect name because 21/2 years ago he was badly injured in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq’s Diyala province that killed seven in his unit. A respiratory therapist, she helped her husband recover and then blessed his return to the war zone.
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Marine Lance Corporal Fabian Hurtado’s last memory of Sgt. Jose Luis Saenz III isn’t how he’ll remember him best. To Hurtado, his sergeant was a can-do man, a family man, who would do anything to protect the men under his command and for the U.S. Marine Corps he loved. And like Saenz, Hurtado had joined […]
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Walk into the long brown tent next to the Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Air Field and the first thing you might see are portable vital sign monitors. There are other devices, too, all of them designed to be used aboard a medical evacuation flight home. Welcome to the Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility, pronouced “CASIF,” the place where hope and healing begin.
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When public affairs backs up reporters in the field, the results are seen in our paper and on the website. You don’t see the invisible hand that made them happen, but without a specialist or a senior airman or a sergeant taking the reporter to the airfield at midnight to get on a plane or a helicopter, just one of the many tasks they do, you wouldn’t see the story.
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MC-12 is a platform for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaisance, called ISR. It’s unamed, but Air Force Lt. Col. Doug Lee, a 40-year-old pilot with 2,000 hours in the F-15 and other fighfighters, says that knowledge is a weapon and that “in this fight killing is not always the right answer.”
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There are things about living in the war zone that are downright wrong. Let’s start with the fact that I havent seen one child on any military base that I have spent time at on this trip to Afghanistan. Or cats and dogs.
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Sherri Fowler was just waiting for a return flight to Dallas when something at her airline gate brought her to tears. Hundreds of people, including airport personnel, air travelers and others just wanting to show support, showered 30 World War II veterans with applause and adoration Friday at San Antonio International Airport. The veterans, some […]
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Ever seen a beehive? Hundreds of bees darting in and out of a hole in one of your trees, somehow managing to avoid each other as they land and take off, going about their business in, well, a businesslike way? That’s Bagram Air Field, a place where the fastest jet can’t chase away the blues.
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‘It was for a group of Pakistani soldiers. About 20 of them gathered around a Special Force medic and he was showing them how to treat a chest wound,’ – U.S. military official, speaking at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.
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Pakistan is in the middle of a bitter war against insurgents. You don’t hear much about it, but the conflict pits seven Pakistani divisions against determined militants and is a crucial part of America’s war in Afghanistan. One military official in Islamabad put it in perspective: ‘The civilians have taken thousands of casualties in an effort to deal with the insurgent threat that they face here. And to try to put it into some context, if any other country in the world, including our own, had seven-plus infantry divisions operating in its own border fighting its own people, they or we would probably call it a civil war.’
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